AWS Lambda and Azure Functions are popular Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) offerings and are a staple of the serverless landscape. With FaaS offerings the cloud provider is responsible for running and managing the underlying compute that powers the service. This allows you to focus solely on building out your function. These serverless platforms automatically scale resources based … Read more
Modern cloud environments provide several different mechanisms and services for deploying a web application. In a more traditional scenario, an application may be deployed to a bare metal server or a virtual machine (VM). The rise and success of Docker have led many cloud platforms to offer means of hosting dockerised applications without having to … Read more
Our Client Services Director, Melise Jones, reflects on her career – especially her time at The Curve. I wrote a blog about Women in Tech back in March, 2021. In it I stated: “Before Women in Tech there were, well, women in tech…I never thought there was anything special or remarkable about the fact that I … Read more
Story points estimation is an estimation method that is often used in agile software development. Story points are a unit of measure used in agile project management to estimate and compare the complexity, effort, and relative size of features or user stories within a project. Instead of providing precise time-based estimates, teams assign story points collaboratively, … Read more
Sometimes it can be useful to request a manual approval before a deploy is unleashed on production. GitHub supports manual approval when you use environments, but only on public repositories or private repositories for GitHub Enterprise. In this post, I look at how GitHub Actions and Microsoft Teams can be used to create a manual … Read more
We use continuous integration and continuous deployment techniques regularly in the delivery of our projects. Whilst our team predominantly uses GitHub Actions these days, we’ve supported a variety of CI tooling including Jenkins and GitLab Pipelines. We have a number of projects that still use Jenkins, even though the majority of our recent projects use … Read more
In this article we look at compiling applications for different CPU architectures using Docker to emulate on an x86 host, with a working example of packaging libcamera-apps for Alpine Linux for an armv7 device (a Raspberry Pi Zero) and armv8 (Raspberry Pi Zero 2). Background Recently the availability of diverse mainstream architectures has increased, moving … Read more
Estimating the effort involved in any project can be a challenge, and software projects are no different. Arriving at an accurate estimate and plan is tricky, to get right. At the start of any project, there is a large amount of uncertainty and numerous assumptions that have to be tackled. These can be refined over … Read more
We process several hundred thousand pounds of transactions for our clients every week. During peak periods, we’ll process this volume in a single day alone, and in exceptional cases, within a few minutes. Taking money from customers may sound simple, but there are many different factors and facets that have to be considered when designing … Read more
Agile has been a popular software development methodology since the early 2000s. Despite being around for over two decades, agile can still be misunderstood or incorrectly applied. What is Agile? Agile software development is rooted in the Agile Manifesto, which was established in February 2001 following a meeting by a prominent set of individuals from … Read more
